January 5, 2016Album Review: Suede – Night Thoughts | By Michael Smith Bloodsports was an important album for Suede: It was a familiar record, one that played to their strengths and expanded upon them, creating a triumphant and well-received comeback after a seven year hiatus. Now that they’re well and truly back into the swing of things, the time to try something new has come. As such, this lead to the creation of Night Thoughts; their most atmospheric and grandiose record to date. While they haven’t ditched their Britpop roots in their entirety, Night Thoughts finds its inspirations and defining traits elsewhere. The pre-release track Outsiders represents one half of the album’s new scope perfectly, with its guitars and vocals carrying a noticeable echo that gives them a shimmering atmosphere, something different from the likes of Bloodsports’ direct tracks and feels substantial and pristine. Vocalist Brett Anderson sounds as comfortable as ever alongside the arrangement, especially as the ambience reaches its peak with the distant, shining backing vocals responding to his direct leading vocal track. On the other side of the coin, however, lie the tracks that make full use of Suede’s newest addition for Night Thoughts; the inclusion of a full string section. Pale Snow makes particularly solid use of this, with its mixture of the piercing whistle of the strings intertwining with the strum of the guitar and the lilt in Anderson’s vocals perfectly, carrying the song with no need for a beat. When You Were Young mixes a full rock arrangement with the string section, largely lacking vocal involvement from Anderson but mixing the two separate styles together for a stellar track, enhanced by the sudden cut to Anderson’s vocals near the song’s end, alongside the eerie mood and the accompanying piano. In terms of atmosphere, the album is an astounding success; both the grandiose ballads and the rock tracks follow styles covered by Suede before, but the distant atmosphere given by the reverb and the varying moods of the strings add a unique touch to the album that makes it stand out. As an album intended to accompany a film, it should almost feel like a half of a package; something that doesn’t quite stand on its own two feet. In practice, however, Night Thoughts more than manages to carry itself based solely on its own merits. Anything that Suede have to throw at us alongside it is the icing on top of the cake.http://renownedforsound.com/index.php/a ... -thoughts/

Thursday 14 January 2016 Michael HannSuede's Brett Anderson: ‘There's a balance between sounding like yourself and not being a self-parody' Suede were always a band of youth. So how are they remaining edgy in their late 40s? By writing fear-ridden lyrics about parenthood Brett Anderson is a rock star again. At 48, he finds that term “a bit superficial”, but he looks startling: he has turned up to our interview as if he is about to take to the stage – at first I think his shirt is unbuttoned nearly to the navel. In fact, a rogue button has come undone halfway down and he keeps sliding a hand over the gap, as if to conceal it; that only draws my attention to it, and I end up spending the whole conversation trying not to stare at his chest. Anderson had a few years of not being a rock star, after Suede split in 2003 – he made three solo records, an album with his former bandmate Bernard Butler as the Tears, and had to get used to being someone other than Brett Anderson out of Suede. “I suppose it did take a while,” he says. “It really taught me to stand on my own two feet, which I needed, having been in a successful band since my 20s. You just don’t grow up because everything’s done for you. Being away from Suede was really important to me personally.” But then Suede reformed in 2010, initially for a one-off gig, and have barely looked back since. The excellent album Bloodsports came out in 2013, and a new one, Night Thoughts, follows later this month. Was Anderson astonished by the fervour that greeted Suede’s return? “I wouldn’t say astonished. I was extremely pleased that it seemed to land that well – when we split, we weren’t particularly mourned.” Bassist Mat Osman, to whom I speak a few days later, had been worried that Suede would be returning to a shrug of apathy. “We’d completely dropped off the radar. There was never any mention of us in the press, on TV, on the radio.” Instead, he found people coming out of the woodwork, and not just the fans who had embraced The Drowners or We Are the Pigs, 20 or so years ago. “When we play now there’s a Red Sea divide between a terrifyingly young first 20 rows, then a gap, then people who look like us. The 30-year-olds are the missing generation.” Everyone who has ever read a rock memoir or watched a documentary about a band knows there is really only one narrative: band forms, band members are thrilled by their own brilliance and the world’s reaction, band members become successful and get blase, band members get fed up of each other, get addicted to drink or drugs, make worse and worse records, split. Suede were no different. Reuniting, though, gave them a chance to revisit all the thrills of the first part of the narrative without having to face the pressures that make the second part inevitable. “That’s why this reunion has been successful,” Anderson says. “It’s been so much about righting lots of wrongs for us. It’s about looking at what we did and trying to rewrite history. You realise what an incredibly privileged position you’re in, because you don’t realise that at first – being in a band becomes real life and you don’t realise how precious it is. You think it’s always going to be the same. You think that creative energy is always going to be there. It’s not always that easy, and there are relationships that are really precious that I regret having let fall apart. You can do it better the second time.” How precious those early times are to musicians becomes vividly apparent a few days later. In the wake of David Bowie’s death, I call Suede’s original guitarist, Butler – who left in fairly bloody fashion during the making of their second album, Dog Man Star – to ask about his favourite Bowie song, and he tells me about the “golden moment” of him and Anderson, in the summer of 1991, plotting Suede and listening to Bowie’s Quicksand over and over again. He sounds like someone remembering their first serious girlfriend years later, a reminiscence that is unexpectedly moving. Anderson’s and Butler’s working relationship – singer and guitarist in competition to be more flamboyant than the other – defined the early years of Suede, before Butler left in 1994. But the group continued for another nine years after that, with a whole lot more friendships at stake. “It’s interesting what being in bands long term does to your relationships,” Anderson says. “Once you’re past the initial point where you’re fighting all the time because you’re young and you’re off your head, because there’s loads of drugs and money around – that maelstrom period – you don’t have the same kind of relationships. Me and Mat used to be very close friends, used to hang out a lot together. We’ve been in a band such a long time and spent so much downtime with each other that we don’t need to hang out any more. I’m glad we all get on now and we can tolerate each other.” Suede’s initial burst of fame in the early 90s was based on what one might call “the Suede universe”, in which stomping, glammy guitars were accompanied by lyrics about bad sex, bad drugs, tower blocks and alienation – “In your council home he jumped on your bones / Now you’re taking it time after time,” from their third single, Animal Nitrate, pretty much nailed the aesthetic. Anderson says he no longer recognises the person who wrote those songs, but recognises the strength of them, and is happy to sing them live. I mention the Who playing My Generation every show, despite the sneers about them not dying before they got old, and Anderson leaps in: “Yeah, and you hear that song and it never sounds tired, does it? It sounds so alive. When we do So Young, it’s a similar thing – I never feel as though it’s ironic. I hate irony in music, I really do. I absolutely hate it. Music is more important than that.” The problem with reuniting well into middle age was that Suede were a band of youth; even if the group wanted to avoid nostalgia by making new music, they couldn’t very well write more songs about bad sex, bad drugs, tower blocks and alienation – Anderson talks of finding “an incredibly fine balance between sounding like yourself but not being a self parody” – and so they needed to find some new voice. On Night Thoughts, then, Anderson tackles parenthood – he has a three year-old son and an 11-year-old stepson – on songs that seem riddled with fear. Anderson ponders for a moment. “Fear’s exactly the word. A lot of it is the fear that is imbued in parenthood. Before you become a parent, you think of all those cliches about how it’s going to change your life, and of course those things are absolutely true. But not for one second did I think about that absolute fear, that terrifying pit-in-the-stomach fear of losing your kids.” If that all sounds a bit soft, then there’s a spikiness in the way Anderson talks about what he didn’t want to be doing. “I wanted to capture some of the neurosis of being a parent and it not be this” – he adopts an ingratiating, unctuous voice – “‘Aren’t I a great dad! Look at me with my kids!’ that I read so much from people in the public eye who are desperate to come across as great parents.” “I’m always interested in when lyricists grow up, in the ones who can do it and the ones who can’t,” Osman says. “I was terrified when Brett told me it was going to be about family – but the way he’s captured the terror and paranoia of family life is amazing.” Anderson remains convinced that the key thing about Suede is that they’re outsiders. I’m not so sure: they reformed to play that staple of the rock aristocracy, the Teenage Cancer Trust benefit; when they were promoting Bloodsports, they were interviewed on BBC Breakfast rather than edgy late-night programmes; and they are a band who – and you never would have said this in 1993 – convey a certain dignity. Though Anderson reckons they’re still a divisive group, they seem to me to be regarded with incredible fondness, a reminder of a time when bands weren’t focus-grouped into blandness before their first single. Maybe Anderson’s need to feel prickled comes from his sense that Suede is the other part of his life now, not the real part. “I’m a full-time father,” he says. “This feels like I’m putting on clothes – the other thing feels like the real thing.” But the moment he starts to sing, the character Brett Anderson out of Suede takes him over, and he chooses to become something remarkable. “If you’re standing on a stage, you’re presenting yourself as different from the audience.It’s an extraordinary thing, and I think you should be extraordinary if you step on stage.” You should be a rock star, in other words. “Well, it’s something everybody should try once in their life.” Night Thoughts is released on Rhino on 22 January. Brett Anderson, Mat Osman and director Roger Sargent discuss the film of Night Thoughts with Michael Hann at the Barbican Cinema on 20 January.

15th Jan 16Brett Anderson: Suede polarised people's opinions Brett Anderson doesn't want Suede to be known as a ''heritage band'' who just play their hits as he is proud that they've always been alternative and ''rubbed people the wrong way'' in the 90s. The 48-year-old singer - who is gearing up to release the band's next LP 'Night Thoughts' - is proud that his band has always been alternative and he wants to keep pushing artistically with the bandTalking about the band's heyday, he said: ''I like that we polarised people's opinion in the 90s. We rubbed people up the wrong way.''We got booed at the NME Awards when we won Best Band.''But for every person out there who loved us there was someone out there who hated us.''I am OK with that and happy for that to continue with this album as it just proves Suede are never anyone's second-favourite band.''And the 'Bloodsports' hitmaker is proud of his band for not following ''the herd'' and insists he never wants to be just another ''heritage band'' that just plays their old hits live. In an interview with The Sun newspaper, he said: ''We've never sat with the herd and that is great. We came back. Not as a heritage band but as a current band that has pushed things even further with this new record. I don't see that as a weakness. I think that's pretty commendable.''http://www.tv3.ie/xpose/article/enterta ... s-opinions

15th Jan 16Suede, Night Thoughts: 'Disillusion and regret combine to produce one of Brett’s best', album reviewAndy Gill | Pity poor Suede – when they released their comeback album Bloodsports three years ago, it rather sank in the wake created by David Bowie’s somewhat more significant comeback album. This time around, not only do they have Bowie’s Blackstar to contend with, but a full-blown global requiem for his passing. They could be excused for thinking themselves cruelly unlucky – though that would at least be apt for Night Thoughts, an album which, in best Suede fashion, empathises with the put-upon and overlooked. This is most immediately evident in “Outsiders”, the first single taken from the album, over whose muscular, pulsing groove and Edge-style cycling guitar riff Brett Anderson hymns a hapless couple “thrown like two winter roses into a broken vase”, seeking solace in romance, clinging to their shared moment like shipwrecked sailors clutching at flotsam. I choose the metaphor deliberately, as the album, its songs segued together to encourage playing it in its entirety, is intended as the thoughts and memories of a man drowning off a deserted beach at night, reflecting upon his life – something like Kate Bush’s “The Ninth Wave” suite, though more direct. There are precious few happy moments in his memories, certainly: as suggested by titles like “I Don’t Know How to Reach You”, “I Can’t Give Her What She Wants” and “What I’m Trying to Tell You”, the protagonist is racked with regret over the way his expressive limitations have chipped away at his chances of happiness and fulfilment. “I don’t know the meaning of much,” he agonises in the latter; “All I’m trying to say is that this is enough, that you’re walking away.” The pumping bass and stomp riff embody his emotional constipation, while Richard Oakes’s guitar winds through the song like wire gradually entwining his heart. It’s tragic, and it’s not the only such moment. “I bought you those pretty things, but you gave them back,” he laments over piercing shards of guitar in “I Don’t Know How to Reach You”, a depiction of alienation creeping implacably into a relationship until there’s nothing more to be said: “I turn away/ I fold the page/ I close the book”. Elsewhere, the fluting strains of Neil Codling’s keyboard strings lend an epic sadness to “Tightrope”, evoking the protagonist’s anxieties over his inability to prevent that creeping alienation because “we know more than we used to”. Some partnerships grow stronger with the increasing familiarity of age; others just breed contempt. There are a few brief glimmers of light illuminating the gloom, notably the children’s choir adding fragile hope to the refrain of “Like Kids” – though even here it’s a delusional attempt to shore up a collapsing relationship with fantasies of childlike freedom. But they’re far outweighed by the overwhelming tide of emotional abjection, which reaches possibly its most heartbreaking expression in the way that the delicate guitar arpeggios of “I Can’t Give Her What She Wants” echo those of “Stairway To Heaven”, even as the female subject’s spirits sink into purgatorial misery as she returns glumly home – “all that’s left is ashes of her sorry little night”. Night Thoughts, then, is about as far from a date album as it can get – which, with their louche glamour, couldn’t be said of earlier Suede recordings. But they were mostly about the exotic, transgressive appeal of youthful outsider-dom, while this is stained by the disillusion and regret of age. The sharpest indication of this comes in “No Tomorrow”, whose outsider protagonist isn’t some Wilde-an gutter-dweller staring at the stars, but an aimless, moribund idler trapped in sink-estate hell. “How long will I shun the race, and sit around in my tennis shirt?” he muses. “How long will it take to break the plans that I never make?” It’s a question that was inevitably begged by those previous celebrations of low-rent outlaw glamour, and, in attempting to answer it, Suede may have made their best album. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 14051.html

15 Jan 2016Brit rockers Suede: ‘The loss of David Bowie is like a close friend dying’Singer Brett Anderson talks about his idol in a revealing interview as we take look at their latest album Night Thoughts JACQUI SWIFT SUEDE always vowed never to come back for the sake of it. When Bloodsports was released in 2013 — their first album in 11 years — they said it was the album the band should have made instead of 2002’s disappointing A New Morning. And it is for that reason they see Bloodsports as a stepping stone to Night Thoughts, the beautifully pensive and brooding album they release next week. Singer Brett Anderson says: “Night Thoughts is a big leap from Bloodsports, a leap of ambition and of faith. “We wanted to take Suede to another level in the same way we did with our debut album and Dog Man Star (their classic second album and last Suede album to feature guitarist Bernard Butler). “In fact, although Suede was our debut album (in 1993), I see Bloodsports as another debut and I see a parallel transition with this new album. “We could never have made Night Thoughts at the time we made Bloodsports. “This album has made us realise we can be quite compromising and experimental.” I meet Anderson in West London before he heads off for a radio interview. Dressed in a smart, dark coat with black leather gloves, he is engaging and proud about his band’s seventh album. It was unfinished business for Suede, who are made up of Anderson, guitarist Richard Oakes, drummer Simon Gilbert, keyboard player and rhythm guitarist Neil Codling and bassist Mat Osman. They split in 2003 but reformed in 2010, originally for one night only — a Teenage Cancer Trust gig at the Royal Albert Hall. Anderson says: “The reason we called it a day in 2003 was because there wasn’t any gas left in the tank. That was quite a brave decision and the right one. “But I didn’t want the Suede story to end like that and now there’s another chapter.” He adds: “I really can’t wait for people to hear the album in context and the songs as a piece. “It was written very much as a continuous piece and you can appreciate it as a flow of songs which work going into each other. “I wouldn’t say it’s a literal concept album but it has themes. If it is close to anything historically, for me it is closest to Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love or Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden. Not that I am saying it’s as good as those, as that’s a very hubristic thing to say. But both of those records take you on an atmospheric journey and the songs are par of the same group.” The idea for Night Thoughts, which was produced by long-term producer Ed Buller, came from lying awake at 4am thinking and worrying about parenthood. Anderson, 48, has a three-year-old son and a stepson, aged ten, with his wife Jodie, a naturopath. He says with a smile: “This is the first album I have written since becoming a fully fledged biological parent. And one of the key things on the record is that having a child myself has awakened so many memories of being a child, which has been really interesting. When my little boy was a baby and I was feeding him baby food, I had this moment where he dribbled and I scraped his mouth with it and I suddenly felt a ghost memory of my mum doing the exact thing to me. Also, when I pick him up by his armpits, I feel my mum doing the same to me. These little things that lay dormant in my head for 45 years are suddenly reawakened. It makes you remember parts of your life you’ve forgotten about. Lots of the songs on the album, like I Don’t Know How To Reach You, are from my father’s point of view about losing touch with me. How as you get older and you are not a little boy any more and go into teenagehood, your relationship with your parents changes. Mine certainly did. I was a grumpy teenager.” Outsiders, Tightrope and Like Kids are classic Suede tracks, while When You Are Young, aided by a full string section, adds to the cinematic element. Thematically, the darker side of Night Thoughts comes from the singer wanting to focus on the fear that comes with parenthood. He explains: “Lots of the songs are inspired by family relationships but I didn’t want to write about it in a sentimental way. I didn’t want this, ‘Aren’t I a great dad’ thing. I needed to express what I was going through in my life. It would have been false to ignore it or have the point of view of a 25-year-old again. It needed to be truly how I was seeing the world. That’s why I focused on the neurotic side of what it’s like and the terrifying thoughts you have — what if something goes wrong and how your life would completely crumble. When I found out I was going to be a dad, there was all these clichés about how it was going to change my life and blah, blah . . . Of course it’s challenging. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the utter fear that sometimes overwhelms you. And that is what this album is about.” There is an accompanying film to Night Thoughts by photographer Roger Sargent, which gives the music an added dimension. Anderson says: “I love the way the album and the film move and join in certain places and then drift apart. The film isn’t supposed to be a literal interpretation of the lyrics. I sat down with Roger and explained the themes and I was happy for him to take it and write a story touching on those things, but not slavishly.” The film begins with a man drowning in the waters of a deserted beach at night. As he fights for life, his mind plays out key events in his life. Love, death and despair are covered. One track, the stunning Pale Snow, is particularly moving, dealing with loss and tragedy. Anderson says: “Yeah, that is really sad. For me, that’s my favourite moment where the music and the visuals coincide. It’s really poignant and really lovely. We deliberately didn’t use any strings on the last album as we didn’t want any other players except us five. But with this album we felt it would be nice to have a bit of texture. We did the Roundhouse shows last year and I can’t wait to get out and play this live.” Anderson believes his band have been brave and ambitious making Night Thoughts, something he is really happy about. He says: “I don’t understand why people see ambition as a negative word. Ambition is what makes great pop music. It’s strange there’s this inverted snobbery about it. This record is very ambitious and is trying to do something that alternative rock bands don’t do today. Look at the great artists. Look at David Bowie. What he did with his career was very ambitious and that’s why his death is such a loss.” Bowie was a major influence on Anderson, and, like most people, he has been saddened by the surprise death of his hero. He says: “It’s been huge. I can’t think of the last time there was such a huge outpouring of emotion publicly. I suppose Princess Diana. It’s been overwhelming. Everyone feels this loss and he obviously meant such a lot to so many people. I have a very personal association with him and his music. Sometimes I feel as though private contemplation about these things has more worth for me. I am not a great sharer of public grief but I totally respect people want to celebrate him in that way. I felt as though I grew up with him and therefore it’s not just like a member of the Royal Family dying, it’s someone who was woven into my life. It’s almost like a close friend has died, even though I didn’t know him like one of my mates. But I’d met him. It’s more than, ‘Oh someone famous has died’. People feel a real sense of personal loss about it because he inspired so many and spoke to so many different generations through his music.” Like the way Anderson idolised Bowie, how does he feel about the continuing adulation of Suede by their fans. He says: “I love it when people come up to me and say, ‘I got married to Wild Ones’ or, ‘The first song I snogged someone to was Sleeping Pills’.To be woven into people’s lives is heartwarming and humbling. And I think people do feel very passionately about Suede. I hope they do. I like that we polarised people’s opinion in the Nineties. We rubbed people up the wrong way. We got booed at the NME Awards when we won Best Band. But for every person out there who loved us there was someone out there who hated us. I am OK with that and happy for that to continue with this album as it just proves Suede are never anyone’s second-favourite band.” Smiling, he says: “We’ve never sat with the herd and that is great. We came back. Not as a heritage band but as a current band that has pushed things even further with this new record. I don’t see that as a weakness. I think that’s pretty commendable.” — Night Thoughts is out next FridayTracklist 1. When You Are Young 2. Outsiders 3. No Tomorrow 4. Pale Snow 5. I Don’t Know How To Reach You 6. What I’m Trying To Tell You 7. Tightrope 8. Learning To Be 9. Like Kids 10. I Can’t Give Her What She Wants 11. When You Were Young 12. The Fur & The FeathersSUN RATING 4.5 OUT OF 5http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sh ... ughts.html

January 15, 2016ALBUM REVIEW: SUEDE – NIGHT THOUGHTS9/10David McElroy Suede’s 2013 album Bloodsports was a sensational comeback for a band whose last album, 2002’s underwhelming A New Morning seemed destined to be a flat end to what was a wonderful catalogue. Bloodsports showed that Suede were far from finished and the subsequent tour reminded us just how enthralling they are live. Happily, Night Thoughts proves that Bloodsports wasn’t a one off and indeed, it trumps that album, reaching heights the band haven’t reached since the seminal Dog Man Star which remains one of my favourite albums of all time. Night Thoughts opens very much in a Dog Man Star way with the brooding, string laden When You Are Young. Ominous strings open the track, sinster and dark, before the guitar lines burst in and layers of sound are added. There’s the same apocalyptic feel as is present on Introducing The Band albeit this time with children’s voices singing you out of the song rather than the Brett Anderson robot that ends that track”. It’s a captivating start and it leads straight into Outsiders, the first track to be released from the album. It’s classic Suede – a huge” Suede do their own interpretation of pop” song with a wonderful post punk guitar line running throughout. Outsiders is one example of the two types of track on display here – urgent, guitar driven glam pop. The wonderful Bowie like No Tomorrow and Like Kids are other examples. Few bands do this sort of music this well. On these tracks, Suede sound as urgent and as vital as they ever have done, crackling with energy as they did on the likes of So Young and Animal Nitrate. The other type of track here is the slower, darker type. Pale Snow is one such track with its dark strings and ambient atmosphere once again recalling Dog Man Star in scope. Tightrope and I Don’t Know How To Reach You have a similar vibe to them with the former a particular highpoint, showcasing Suede’s ability to craft dark, romantic ballads in a way very few others can., The way it builds to its climax is thrilling. The penultimate track, When You Were Young, acts as a reprise of the opening track before the closer The Fur & The Feathers arrives, bringing the album to a beautiful end. I’m going to wear out the Dog Man Star comparisons soon, but this track reminds me of that album’s epic closer Still Life. It starts out as an icy, atmospheric ballad before building to an intense, pounding finale that fades out slowly. A wonderful end to a wonderful album. Night Thoughts is a supremely confident record and one that should see Suede restored to full national treasure status. While their contemporaries continue to split, reform and put out under par “will this do?” releases, Suede continue to innovate, experiment and ultimately thrill.http://www.xsnoize.com/album-review-sue ... -thoughts/

January 18, 2016Interview with Mat Osman of SUEDEAlastair Ross British musical stalwarts Suede are about to release their 7th album “Night Thoughts” on January 22nd , an album in which they harness their masterful musical ambition, fusing the tale of two doomed lovers over the course of 12 tracks, each track interweaving into the next, and set to a feature film directed by acclaimed photographer Roger Sargent. The album contains all of the elements that any fan of the band loves, soaring epic choruses ‘Outsiders’, mournful balladry ‘Pale Snow’ and the glammy sounds of ‘Like Kids’. COT had the enormous pleasure of speaking to Mat Osman about why they chose to make the sort of album that felt right to them, regardless of the prevailing commercial winds. The idea of a band doing this style of album is very exciting and refreshingly adventurous, what lead you to this path?“I think partly it was kind of the reaction to “Bloodsports”, “Bloodsports” was such uh, kind of specifically a comeback record, I think we all wanted to make a five of us in the room, quite punchy, quite like a classic Suede record you know what I mean? Almost like this is what you’ve been missing. And having done that and gotten such a good reaction (with “Bloodsports”) I think we all wanted to do something, the sort of thing you can’t do as a comeback record, something with a bit more scope. You know there’s nothing better than knowing there’s people out there listening to you, it’s in incredibly privileged position to be in, to know that you can do something that’s a bit kind of dramatic and longwinded and complicated and people will take the time to perhaps get into it. You know so it was partly that, it was partly the fact that uh I don’t know with the last one we kept getting told about how the music business is now and it was all albums are dead and it’s just about playlists, it needs to be 12 quite snappy tracks and it didn’t really compute with us, you know because we spent alot of time with people who love the first record and were talking to us about the kind of records they like and films and television they liked and I kept feeling this real hunger for something with a bit more substance and you know and not just from music, like I say from film and box sets of TV and long form film, so it was partly that wanting to do something that was really an immersive album, something that you sat down and you’d listen to from start to finish, you know the way you would with a film. I think I’d tend to say it doesn’t have to be this way, you know I think what happens if you end up with an industry that constantly chasing the lowest common denominator and the freedom that we got when we finished “Bloodsports” was just the sudden realisation that you know we’re not going to be No.1 were not going to be on teen radio, it gives you an incredible freedom, suddenly it’s like ok, well we don’t need to do anything other than what excites us and we wanted to make that kind of “Hounds of Love” album, where the songs meld into one each other and the music is as much a journey as the lyrics are, something with a bit more ambition and I think we all felt we were in the right place to do that” When you went to record the album, was it always the plan to approach it in a conceptual fashion, or did evolve over time?“No No, right from the start, the very start, it was kind of we’d been through that whole write 100 songs and throw away 80 of them for “Bloodsports”, that was kind of getting back into the song writing thing, with this one Neil(Codling) and Richard(Oakes) pretty much wrote a record, they wrote about 45 minutes of music, lots of which ran into each other and lots of different themes re-emerged. We went to Belgium which were we started recording and basically recorded everything without Bret having any melodies or any words, which he’s never done before, so it was a bit of a leap in the dark. And then he sat down to write to the whole thing and we had no idea if it was going to work, it hasn’t ended up the same, uh since then we‘ve added about 4 songs and cut quite alot of it and moved stuff around. It always started off as a record that was influenced by film music and stuff like that, the way you can have quite meandering pieces and scenes that reemerge, theres lots of stuff on the record that is made up of bits and pieces of other songs. Theres a track called ‘Pale Snow’ which was a cut and shut of two other songs and it doesn’t repeat at all, its not the kind of thing you’d sit down with an acoustic guitar, it’s a creation of the studio. (at this stage I hadnt heard the album, only the first two singles – now thankfully remedied – its great!) It’s difficult “Like Kids” and “Outsiders” they’ll for the radio, they are literally the two least typical things on the record you know what I mean, they are the two things we thought might get played on the radio. It (“Night Thoughts”)is very different and its very beautiful, its definitely a bit more left field than anything we’ve ever done, it bears some of the same kind of ambition and scope of “Dog Man Star” but I think its much more, it flows in a completely different way to that record” When did the idea to set the album to a feature film come to mind?“It was very late actually, the record was all done, all done and mixed and everything and it was, just we’d spent a lot of time making it sound like something you’d listen to from start to finish and then of course the idea of videos reared their head and youre like Oh Fuck!, you have to cut this thing up and we’d all been in our little bubble and really enjoyed making a record this way. I mean you’re talking about about videos and looking at showreels and its all so depressing and superficial and we suddenly thought how can we rather than take away from the record it is, how can we reinforce it and we thought we’ll do a video that lasts for the whole album and doesn’t cut up into chapters and songs and halfway through doing that a 45 minute video becomes a film. So we thought lets do it, lets do this properly, lets commission a film, lets give it to a film maker we trust, but lets not tell him what he has to do. It was just away of reinforcing the idea of it (the album) I’m a huge fan of that moment when you go to the cinema and you sit down and the lights go out, you turn your phone off and you just let yourself be transported for 2 hours. I’m quite envious of cinema in that way, that people accept the fact you have to give it your concentration. It was an attempt to give that sense of occasion to that piece of music.” After the successful staging of the film at the recent Roundhouse gigs in London, where the band played behind the screen as the film played, are there plans to keep touring in this fashion?“We are doing a European tour in late Jan-early Feb, I’m not sure quite how long we’ll keep doing it, its quite difficult to do for weird reasons, because it needs to be a really big stage for us to play behind it and to get a huge screen on and for people to be able to see it and at the same time we don’t want it to be too big and we don’t want it to be all seated because the second set is a more straight forward Suede set. Its not straight forward, you can’t just go to a booking agent and say you know, get me ten 5000 seaters across Europe, just do it. So I don’t know how long we’ll do it for, it’s a complicated, expensive way of touring but definitely for all those shows across Europe we will and I guess its up to the festivals and people to book us, we’ll take it anywhere, I really like doing it, it’s a very un-suedelike show, were normally all about communication with the audience and to be hidden away like that, its quite offputting, but in a good way I think and I’m really enjoying doing it, but for how far into the year we’ll keeping doing it, I don’t know” Realistically audiences in this part of the world are unlikely to be able to experience this epic show, are their plans to perhaps release it as a live DVD? “I can totally imagine that, there is a version of the album that comes with the film and you get that kind of film soundtrack thing, I think its possible I mean it looks amazing, its one of those strange situations because the screen is so big we didn’t get to try it till the day before, us actually behind the screen being lit up, so it was a bit of a baptism of fire, it looks really good and everyones been really good about not filming it, its quite beautiful because you’ve got some vast landscapes and then figures you just see pop up ghostly in the background, its quite odd. Our lighting guy came up with the idea and as I said until the night before we were like this might just look like shit (laughs) no ones really done it before and it might look awful, I still haven’t seen the show, I’ve only seen pictures of it.” Beyond the UK and European tour dates, does the band have plans or ambitions to bring “Night Thoughts” elsewhere?“Yeah, this year we are going to try and go pretty much everywhere we can. We’ll be doing festivals in the Summer, we didn’t do much last year because it was all recording and I think everyone is hungry to see some places. I know there is vague rumblings about Asia and some talk of Australia(!), talk of South America. We will have to wait and see, it’s not that we don’t not want to come to places its just the sheer practicalities of it. This year is much more likely than any year since we’ve been back because I think were all quite excited about taking the album to different places. I love playing places we haven’t been before or haven’t been for the past 20 years, different places to mix it up” And one last question as the interview is interrupted by the voice of doom to say your time is almost up…how did the band really feel when they first made their comeback with “Bloodsports”“Absolutely petrified (laughs) its very strange because its one of those things were you look back now and its obvious there are loads of people who love the band, but you don’t know, we kind of disappeared from any media here (UK), so you don’t know. A comeback record is really hard to do and theres a reason why theres so many bad ones because you go out and play the old songs and its easy and theres this tendency to go great! Lets just record 12 new songs and it’ll be like the old days but its really not. With “Bloodsports” we went through so many songs and years learning to write again and we discarded stuff that was too much like what we’d done before and discarded stuff that was to far away from what we’d done before. You know it’s a long hard slog and its not an easy thing to do, you know what I mean? That kind of rush of creativity you have in your twenties, its harder and harder to recapture, hard to find places the band can be interesting still without repeating yourself, so yeah we were really nervous and really proud of the record, I thought it was really good, but I think we were all aware it was an unlikely success if it was going to happen” So there you have it, the new album is strange and beautiful and come this Friday you can indulge in it and the companion film and at the same time we can hold our collective breath and hope that the band make it to this end of the world and not just Australia…fingers crossed!

15 Jan 2016. Ten astonishing facts about Brit-glam group Suede By Nick Dent The godfathers of Britpop consolidate their renaissance with an epic, brooding new record complete with its own feature film. Just don’t call Night Thoughts a concept album. “It was the best thing we ever did.” On the phone from London, Suede bass player Mat Osman is not talking about the UK five-piece’s sweeping and dramatic new album, Night Thoughts. Nor is he referring to their miraculous 2013 comeback album, Bloodsports. He’s actually talking about the band’s decision to break up. In 1992, Suede had catapulted to stardom in the breathing space between the death of shoegazing and the birth of Britpop. The London-based outfit melded the vocal stylings of Bowie, the glam guitars of T-Rex and the council-estate poetry of the Smiths. Soaring songs, along with lead singer Brett Anderson’s studied androgyny, involving self-flagellation with microphones and provocative comments in the press such as being “a bisexual man who’s never had a homosexual experience”, made them for a while – at least before the arrival of Blur and Oasis – the only band in town. Three UK number one albums followed and a raft of hit singles: ‘Metal Mickey’, ‘Animal Nitrate’, ‘Trash’, ‘The Beautiful Ones’, ‘Electricity’. It was a dream run that not even the embittered departure of lead guitarist and songwriter Bernard Butler in 1994 could halt; nor the retirement of keyboardist Neil Codling, suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, in 2001; nor (for that matter) a well-documented history of drug abuse. Suede did run out of steam creatively in 2002 with a lacklustre album A New Morning. They had failed to conquer the world – America and Australia never really got them – but it had been a good innings and no one was surprised when they announced their indefinite hiatus. For Osman, who first met Anderson at school in West Sussex in 1984 and had known little else but the music biz, it was a shock. “I didn’t realise that these things could break,” he says. So when Suede’s 1995-2001 line-up reconvened in 2010, they were determined not to coast on nostalgia but to write new material living up to their best work. Bloodsports, an album of both catchy pop highs and dark impassioned ballads, returned Suede to the UK top ten in 2013 and earned some of the best reviews of their career. “Nowadays when we play live or are in the studio I’m so aware of the precariousness of it; the preciousness of it,” says Osman – incidentally, the brother of BBC game show host Richard Osman (Pointless). “Coming back to that, I think we work harder and the gigs are better, because we know quite how wrong you can go.” When it came to writing the follow-up, Night Thoughts, Suede (and longtime producer Ed Buller) decided to throw out the rulebook, recording an album’s worth of music rather than writing complete songs first. “We went off to a studio in Belgium, the four of us without Brett, and recorded the record, with no clear idea of where vocals were going to go, and just gave it to Brett and said: ‘see if you can make an album out of this.’” The result is still recognisably a Suede record, with themes of love, despair and transcendence, and hummable could-be hits such as ‘Outsiders’, ‘Like Kids’ and ‘What I’m Trying to Tell You’, but there are also epic atmospheric tracks, some using full orchestra. It’s not a million miles from their second album Dog Man Star (1994) – the album that nearly tore the band asunder but which is regarded by many as their crowning achievement. Night Thoughts is also a deliberate affront to current trends: a concept album, perhaps? “I don’t think it’s a concept album. I think it’s an album,” says Osman. “Twenty years ago, what we were trying to do would have been entirely unremarkable. You know, it’s a record that has a start and a finish and the tracks flow into each other. It has themes that repeat. That’s what records used to be, before everything got chopped up to go on playlists.” Be that as it may, the entire album comes with its own 47-minute feature film, directed by Richard Sargent, in which a drowning man’s life flashes before his eyes. “It kind of came about through a hatred of Suede videos really,” Osman laughs. “We finished the record and were really proud of the way it did feel like one piece. And we thought, ah, fuck, we have to cut this up for the videos. And we said: well, we’ll just make one film for it.” That film was premiered at two London gigs last November, projected on a screen while the band performed the album in its entirety. The shows got rapturous receptions, although the band did hedge their bets with a second half of greatest hits. Suede’s live shows, galvanising as they are, are not the most startling thing about them. As Anderson once said: “The history of this fucking band is ridiculous. It’s like Machiavelli re-writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas...” Here’s their career in ten astonishing facts:1 Before Suede found drummer Simon Gilbert, Mike Joyce from the Smiths answered their ad and auditioned for them. “That was one of the strangest days of my life because we didn’t really believe it was true,” recalls Osman. “We wrote ‘Smiths-influenced’ in the advert, but it just didn’t seem possible. Then [Joyce] walked in through the door. It was never going to work but I tell you what, it was such an amazing thing for us, and especially for Brett, that he took us seriously.”2 Ricky Gervais was one of their early managers… and Suede once supported Gervais’s band, Son of Bleeper.“Yeah, he worked for our management company back in the day, sending out Suede demo tapes and stuff. He was a very pretty boy, like a young Bowie – you have to check out his band Seona Dancing. When he made it on TV I did the longest double take. He was always a really sarky bugger, he really was. I’m really glad he’s a comedian rather than a manager because he was a fucking shit manager!”3 On the cusp of success, rhythm guitarist Justine Frischmann left the group – and also her relationship with lead singer Anderson, for none other than Blur’s Damon Albarn.It was the kindest thing she could have done. Anderson’s broken heart fuelled some of the best tracks on Suede’s debut album, and the band’s chemistry crystallised as a four-piece. Frischmann went on to have success with her own Britpop group, Elastica.4 A 1992 cover of Melody Maker proclaimed them the ‘Best New Band in Britain’ before they had officially released any music.“I thought: ‘fuck, I’m actually gonna do this,’” says Osman. “It’s a really strange thing. We’d been so ignored for so long. We couldn’t get gigs and we couldn’t get any press and we were so out of step with all the bands around us. It’s difficult to convey how powerful the British music press were at the time. It suddenly meant the rest of the world that didn’t live in Camden would know who we were.”5 During the recording of their second album in 1994, at the height of their fame, their genius guitarist Bernard Butler quit – and the band were OK with that.“I look back now and wonder, what the fuck were we thinking? He was the main songwriter, probably the best guitarist of his generation. And he left and we just got on with it. We felt kind of bulletproof at the time. We had an idea of the kind of band we were and the kind of band that mattered.”6 They found Suede fan Richard Oakes to replace Butler and their next album, Coming Up, was a triumph, yielding five hit singles in 1996.“We got a 17 year old in who had never been in a band! We just forced our way through it with sheer ambition and stubbornness, and probably stupidity.”7 They called it quits after the flop of 2002 album A New Morning…“It was partly a huge relief. We’d made a shit record that I wasn’t proud of and that makes you feel kind of worthless, because your life is tied up in it.”8 …but they reformed for a charity concert in 2010, and in 2013 released one of their best records yet, Bloodsports.“Lots of bands that come back are really, really lazy. It’s so seductive, because you go out, play all the old songs and no one’s seen you for ten years and you get this amazing reaction. So on Bloodsports we were brutal. It was like, write ten songs, keep one. Write ten songs, keep one...”9 Their new album Night Thoughts is also a ripper.“It was really hard to make. As you get older it gets harder to find those places where the band is interesting, but not repeating itself. Good things are hard to do, which is why everyone doesn’t do them…”10 They won the NME Godlike Genius Award for 2015 for having “fundamentally altered the course of alternative music in the 1990s”.“The awards are one thing, but the fact people like the records and come to the gigs is the real vindication. The fact that we did something good after doing something shit is vindication enough really.”Night Thoughts (Warner) is out on Jan 22. http://www.au.timeout.com/sydney/music/ ... roup-suede

Jan 19, 2016Suede's Brett Anderson Explains How Parenthood and Fighting the Zeitgeist Shaped 'Night Thoughts'By Cam Lindsay Suede's Brett Anderson Explains How Parenthood and Fighting the Zeitgeist Shaped 'Night Thoughts'After successfully reuniting in 2010 and releasing a comeback album three years later, debonair English rockers Suede have returned with their seventh full-length. Due out January 22 via Warner, Night Thoughts is more than just an album, though — it's also a film directed by NME photographer Richard Sargent that runs the same length of time. The band performed the album alongside the visual accompaniment at select gigs toward the end of 2015; the film will also be included on DVD in the deluxe CD edition of the album. "The film is by a friend of ours," singer Brett Anderson tells Exclaim! "I sat down with him and went through the themes of the album, which he took and worked out a narrative, his own story. The album is about birth, death, life, decaying, youth and parenthood. And sometimes the [film's] narrative meets the themes of the record and sometimes it veers off into his own interpretation. It's about a man who loses his son and then his life falls apart. It's actually quite bleak." The same can be said for the album. Following the sexually charged nature of 2013's Bloodsports, Suede completely changed the narrative for its follow-up. Night Thoughts is a contemplative trip into Anderson's thoughts on mortality. Becoming a father weighed heavily on his mind when writing the album, but not in the way most songwriters express the emotions surrounding parenthood. "I wanted to write about parenthood, but I didn't want to write about it from a sentimental angle," he explains. "I didn't want it to be this, 'Oh look at me going to the zoo with my son' kind of thing. It would be forced for me to ignore the huge changes that have happened in my life in the last three years. It would be ridiculous. To ignore that would be crazy of me. I wanted to sort of do it in a Suede way, and Suede don't do happy-clappy or jolly very well. We sometimes do, but we get it wrong. I wanted to do it in a thoughtful, slightly neurotic way. "They don't tell you about the terror before you become a parent. It's explained to you that it will be challenging and life-changing and wonderful, all of these things, but they never say the fucking terror of being responsible for this vulnerable person. None of it is thoughts like that, and that is what the Night Thoughts are. Lots of the album is about mortality and that fear of death. Because I don't give a shit about my death for my own sake. I give a shit about it for the people I'm not going to be there for. If I was a single person, I kind of wouldn't give a shit about it. But now I have to look after myself. I've got other people that depend on me." In the planning stages of the album, Suede sought to make something that demanded the listener's attention. And so the intention behind Night Thoughts was to make one piece of music that is to be consumed from beginning to end. In the age of iTunes and short attention spans, Anderson recognizes that it might be a bit of a risk, but he doesn't care if the album goes against the grain. "I think everyone is telling us now that no one has an attention span and that people listen to songs then disappear off and listen to something else," Anderson says. "There is an assumption that everyone listens to music the way the mainstream music buyers [do], and I don't think that's how it is. There are armies of people that want depth, that want to commit to it, that want a fuller experience. And I wanted to appeal to those people rather than the mainstream. There is a pressure to do things in a certain way because that is how the zeitgeist is going, but I want to go completely against the zeitgeist."http://exclaim.ca/music/article/suedes_ ... _new_album

January 20, 2016Suede swayed by family life Harvey Rae Suede returned in a blaze of glory on 2013 album Bloodsports. Their first record since 2002, it found the glam-rocking Britpop visionaries sounding fresh and revitalised. As comeback albums go, it is one of the few in recent years to rival 2015’s return from US riot grrrls Sleater-Kinney. Just as Bloodsports’ DNA could be traced to Suede’s self-titled 1993 debut, follow-up Night Thoughts is something of spiritual successor to 1994 masterpiece Dog Man Star, according to bassist Mat Osman. “It so reminded me of the feeling when we did Dog Man Star, when you suddenly go ‘This is f…... great, everyone’s listening’,” Osman says from home in London. “It’s darker, more cinematic, very much one piece. It’s meant to be listened to as a whole. “I think it’s a sense of ambition as much as anything. I can remember when we finished the (self-titled) first album and suddenly in London there were a whole load of bands who sounded like us. I remember being with Bernard (Butler, former guitarist) and saying, ‘Right, we’re going to make something that no f..... can rip off’. “And very much with this it’s the same thing. Let’s take it a step further. The slower songs are slower and the sadder songs are sadder.” It’s a tantalising prospect for Suede fans but Night Thoughts isn’t exactly Dog Man Star part two. Back then they were the wild ones singing about James Dean and dealing ecstasy. Night Thoughts is singer Brett Anderson’s first album since having kids and finds him reflecting not only on his own family life but also his parents’ struggles raising him. “In my mind I Don’t Know How to Reach You was always about a romantic relationship breaking down,” Osman says. “And then I was in an interview with Brett and he was ‘It’s about my Dad. It’s about how I grew apart from him and it’s about my worries that suddenly I have a child and how do you communicate?’ “I must admit I dreaded it because rock stars’ songs about their kids are usually awful. But it’s a really unsentimental record. It’s about the terror of having kids.”Night Thoughts is released January 22.https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/enter ... -thoughts/